In the mid-1960s, TV networks were looking to capitalize on the success of the Beatles’ “Ed Sullivan” appearance. Primetime musical variety shows were standard issue, and in 1965, one of them booked Howlin’ Wolf. It was a gift not only for the blues hero, who wasn’t getting much radio play at the time, but also for anybody fortunate enough to be watching ABC’s “Shindig!” that night. On the show, this towering bluesman with a booming, craggy voice belted “How Many More Years” and played the fuck out of his harmonica. He was literally shakin’ all over. Billy Preston played piano; the house band was excellent. Wolf was surrounded by smiling, clapping white teenagers. It’s excellent television. And it almost didn’t happen.

“Shindig!” creator Jack Good wanted an episode with Wolf and the Rolling Stones, but the network shot it down. An ABC executive once apparently told Good that the show was “too black,” which eventually led the creator to walk away entirely. Thankfully, the Rolling Stones forced the network’s hand—no Wolf, no Stones. Right before Wolf performed, the host interviewed Brian Jones. “We started playing because we wanted to play rhythm and blues,” mumbled the guitarist. “Howlin’ Wolf was one of our greatest idols.” An impish grin on his face, the Stones guitarist told the host, “Now it’s about time you shut up and we had Howlin’ Wolf on stage!”

The entire British Invasion was built on the backs of kids who somehow managed to snag copies of records released by the Chicago-based blues label Chess, study them like sacred texts, and play their own versions to massive commercial and critical success. So Wolf’s appearance on “Shindig!” was a full-circle moment: Chicago blues icon influences skinny white British rockers, and then the young guys ensure their hero’s moment in the spotlight. That dynamic was cemented further in 1971, when Wolf recorded an album in London with Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, and the Stones’ rhythm section.

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Wolf, Muddy Waters, and John Lee Hooker records didn’t just make an impact in the UK—kids living in America were trying out their own versions of the Chicago blues, too. One group of those kids called themselves the Shadows of Knight. (Originally, they were just the Shadows, but after they realized that name was taken, they added “of Knight” to capitalize on the British Invasion’s success.) Really, that’s full circle—the Rolling Stones worship the Chicago blues, make hits by covering blues songs, and inspire a Chicago-area band to make suburban Chicago versions of British Invasion blues records.

The Shadows started when they were all high schoolers—teenagers playing parties and teen clubs. Eventually, they became the house band at an Arlington Heights hot spot called the Cellar—a club that couldn’t seem to hold onto one address. It was started by Paul Sampson, a guy who worked at the post office and ran a local record store. Realizing that teen clubs were good business in the ’60s, he rented the VFW hall to host Saturday night shows. When the VFW kicked them out, the Cellar popped up at country clubs, former grocery stores, and finally, the basement of a shuttered school. Cellar shows sold out frequently, and kids from Chicago and surrounding suburbs would travel there to see nationally touring acts.

Soon, the Shadows of Knight were overshadowing their out-of-town counterparts. “The Cellar got so popular that we had to have two shows a night,” Shadows frontman Jimy Sohns once said. “That was the screaming era, where the kids would charge the stage, and we got to be big enough to where it would disrupt the headliner coming on after us.”

Shadows of Knight. Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.

At some point, the Shadows of Knight literally billed themselves as “Chicago’s Rolling Stones.” The branding, while opportunistic, made sense. One of their 1966 albums is called Back Door Men. They recorded Muddy Waters’ “Got My Mojo Workin’,” John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom,” and Willie Dixon’s “Spoonful.” Not only that, but they reveled in the stereotypical rock’n’roll lifestyle. Frontman Jimy Sohns was working up a “hide your daughters” wildman mythology for himself, earning citations for indecent public exposure at live shows. (In the mid-’60s, this just meant that he took off his shirt during a performance.) In several interviews over the years, Sohns has bragged about how many groupies he came to know. The band’s manager Bill Traut described their intrinsically wild tendencies at the time: “They always tore places up.” Years later, Sohns would do jail time on cocaine charges and boast about beating up Sid Vicious in the late 1970s.

The turning point in the Shadows of Knight’s career came when Traut got word that “Gloria” by Van Morrison’s band Them had been banned from the airwaves. (Apparently, “She comes into my room/ Yeah, and she makes me feel all right” was considered too risqué for mid-’60s radio.) The Shadows of Knight changed the line slightly, and more importantly, they made sure to hit the song’s iconic chorus even harder—compared to Them’s version, even more voices were belting the word “Gloria.” It became a huge hit for the band, and it led to them traveling the world, opening for the biggest acts imaginable, and for a time, living the rock’n’roll dream. There’s a 1966 live Shadows of Knight album that was recorded at the Cellar, which is a perfect document of how powerful they were at the time: You can hear girls screaming while Sohns is power growling and Joe Kelley is ripping through an ace guitar solo. The live version of “Gloria” is three times as long as the single. It’s a document of a band that, however briefly, found widespread success. Throughout that live record, you can totally understand why.

Several other bands who held court in suburban basements made a national impact at the time. The Buckinghams got a soft rock #1 hit with “Kind of a Drag.” The New Colony Six also capitalized on the British Invasion by adopting a uniform of long red coats and white pants—their output in ‘66 included pleasant-if-vanilla ballads like “I Confess.” The Ides of March from the western suburb Berwyn would have a hit with “Vehicle” in 1970, but made their first impression in ‘66 with some puppy love and teen heartbreak singles. The Cryan’ Shames’ point-perfect harmonies got their cover of the Searchers’ “Sugar and Spice” on the charts.

Other bands flew under the radar with quietly great singles. The Huns were typical of the scene at the time—they were sophomores at St. Viator High School in Arlington Heights. They made the teen club and basement show rounds, won battle of the bands competitions, played the Cellar regularly, and landed gigs opening for the Cryan’ Shames. They released exactly one single: the 1966 ripper “Destination Lonely.” Meanwhile, the Royal Flairs were imports from Omaha. They figured if they ever wanted to “get anywhere” with their music, they needed to settle down in a bigger market. They moved to Chicago, became the house band at a few clubs, and recorded a series of singles in 1966. “Suicide” is the best among them—a garage rock song with harmonicas and surf vibes. The suburban basement rock bubble would inevitably burst in short order, but for a short while, business was undeniable.

Of all the bands in that scene, the Shadows of Knight were easily the most blues-oriented of the bunch. But while their albums featured a handful of blues covers, they weren’t nearly as dedicated to the form as the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Butterfield, who grew up in the Hyde Park neighborhood, wasn’t just hearing the Chicago blues via British rock bands—he was learning first-hand, visiting blues clubs in the late 1950s. In the ’60s, he was a University of Chicago student who dropped out to spend more time perfecting his harmonica solos in bars. Butterfield, Elvin Bishop, and Mike Bloomfield were literally learning from legends like Muddy Waters (who, unaccustomed to seeing white guys in that particular club, thought his visitors were from the IRS) and Howlin’ Wolf (whose rhythm section became members of Butterfield’s band). They were already a local attraction, and then in 1965, they caught their break, releasing their first album on Elektra Records, and Bloomfield got picked up to join Bob Dylan’s band. He played on Highway 61 Revisited as well as Dylan's infamous electric set at Newport.

The Paul Butterfield Blues Band Photo by David Gahr/Getty Images

The Paul Butterfield Blues Band weren’t exactly chart darlings, but by 1966, they’d grown to be much more than a typical bar band. “[Bloomfield] had been given something that was represented as ‘Leary acid,’ and he took it and spent the entire evening listening to Indian music,” once said the band’s keyboardist Mark Naftalin. Then, the next day, the song “East-West” started to take shape. The longform jam was massively influential—a recording where the blues intersected with Indian raga and jazz. Live, they’d sometimes play it for a half hour. The recording goes for 13 minutes on the band’s excellent 1966 album East-West. It’s considered a landmark moment, especially in jam band culture.

East-West was a record by guys who had mastered the craft at the feet of their idols and then subverted the genre into something completely different. But keep in mind: Chess Records was still going during Bloomfield’s acid-headed blues voyages and while the Shadows of Knight were sweating it out to Muddy Waters songs in suburban basements. The label would get sold in 1969, but in ‘66, both Bo Diddley and Howlin’ Wolf made solid showings with “Ooh Baby” and “My Mind Is Rambling,” respectively. That year, they also released one of their best-ever recordings by an artist who could arguably howl better than Wolf.

Koko Taylor. Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.

Like so many of her peers, Koko Taylor came up to Chicago from the South. Born and raised in Tennessee, she grew up singing gospel and Memphis Minnie songs. By the time she and her soon-to-be-husband Robert “Pops” Taylor got to Chicago in 1953, she was well-acquainted with the blues. She worked as a housecleaner throughout the week, and when the weekend came, the two of them would go to small blues bars. Frequently, artists would invite her on stage to sing something, which is how she was discovered by Willie Dixon. The songwriter was working as Chess’ A&R man at the time, and upon hearing her giant voice, he approached her. “My god, I never heard a woman sing the blues like you sing the blues,” he said. “That’s what the world needs today—a woman like you to sing the blues.”

Dixon got Taylor signed to Chess and had her record “Wang Dang Doodle” for the label’s Checker imprint. (Howlin’ Wolf previously recorded the song but, apparently, hated it.) The song was based on a lesbian party song called “Bull Dagger’s Ball,” and in Dixon’s version, “Fast Fuckin’ Fannie” became “Fast Talkin’ Fannie.” It’s a song where a bunch of people get invited to a fish fry to drink, party, fight, and break windows. “There’ll be snuff juice everywhere,” Taylor sings at one point, which is awesomely gross—people are going to party so hard in a room that reeks of fish that there’s going to be broken glass and brown tobacco saliva all over the place. The Chicago blues had found its way into music by white teenagers and twenty-somethings across the city, but no man—not even the great Howlin’ Wolf—could pull off bacchanalian revelry quite like Koko. It was Chess’ last hit record and became Taylor’s signature song. It cemented her position as Queen of the Chicago Blues.